Australian Science Makes the Regenerating Mouse 762
FruFox writes "Australian scientists have created mice which can regenerate absolutely any tissue except for the tissues of the brain. Heart, lungs, entire limbs, you name it. This is the first time this has been seen in mammals. The potential implications are positively mammoth. I thought this warranted attention. :)"
unacceptable! (Score:3, Insightful)
Skepsis? (Score:3, Insightful)
By the same token, if these people go public with it they probably already have a preprint up somewhere. Anyone in the field know anything?
This is cool and all.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sterility perhaps?
As someone else here pointed out, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and, in these cases, extraordinary caution. I'm looking forward to the results though.
Re:Evolutions conclusions being meddled with? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I Must Be Totally Uncool... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
(Presuming governments try and withhold the technology).
People will die in mass over population if the government give us this technology.
People will die in riots if the government give us the technology but try to control over population with laws controling birth rights
It at time like this I wish I hadn't read Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Red Mars' series.
Karma (Score:2, Insightful)
If it works out, people will do really crazy stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this is one of the coolest things I've ever read on
Military interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Though in this case I reckon the Military could get very in this kind of 'medicine'. Imagine an army of self healing soldiers. Get a leg blown off and then grow it back.
Increased risk of cancer? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Skepsis? (Score:5, Insightful)
... And, being a Murdoch rag, it's not particularly well respected, either. I find the Sydney Morning Herald [smh.com.au], aka the Sadly Moaning Horrid, to be a better paper all round, even if it does have a habit of riding particular bandwagons until the wheels fall off (*coughReneRivkincough*).
Re:What does this say about evolution? (Score:3, Insightful)
One possible explanation is that it was just never important for a creature to live longer than it takes to rear it's young. So there's no evolutionary driver for it.
And the counter driver might be that living too long causes you to use resources that would otherwise be available to your young.
That kind of puts life in perspective.
Just a thought. Cheers.
Re:unacceptable! (Score:4, Insightful)
In the second case, it only permits more extreme piercings...
Re:Karma (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Start building better mousetraps! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:2, Insightful)
Just think about this for a moment though. What entity would most oppose regenerative organs?
You guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry. After all, anti-rejection drugs are a tidy little market for them.
We're entering a brave new world though. Every day discoveries that will impact the human lifespan are made. Aubrey DeGrey is an interesting person whose work is a must follow.
Re:What does this say about evolution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:unacceptable! (Score:2, Insightful)
why would PETA denounce the use of this medical technology in humans?
they might be opposed to using animals to develope the technology, but using already-developed technology on humans wouldn't hurt animals so it doesn't make any sense for animal rights activists to protest against it.
Re:What's a Jewish boy to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
All joking aside there are quite a few people, myself included, who would welcome the chance to replace the aforementioned parts since they were removed without our permission.
Re:Will celebrity plastic surgery UNDO? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:5, Insightful)
So they lose one tidy little market. So what? You don't think that the potential market in pro-regeneration drugs (and other drugs used during these sorts of surgeries) looks the least bit enticing, and potentially even MORE lucrative, than anti-rejection drugs? If they have ten to fifteen (or more) years, don't you think they will conduct studies left and right and get with the times? Pharmaceutical companies are not exactly the recording industry, they have some smart people working there...
Because of evolutionary advantages to death (Score:4, Insightful)
Where do you think we'd be if older people who are stuck in their ways and have power and authority stuck around for longer, and retained their powerful positions?
There are advantages in replacing old minds with fresh young ones who challenge the old perspectives. We love children for a reason.
That is facilitated by death, and also by crippling injuries both physical and mental.
These advantages are particularly obvious in our human social structures - for the time being, anyway. As an example, in the recent article about computers automatically learning language grammars, there was an interesting comment that linguistics won't move on until Chomsky dies... There's some truth to that in all of science, politics, etc.
Complex social evolution does not necessarily favour health for all individuals.
An interesting corollary to that hypothesis is that there exist changes to the structures of society, and changes to the structures in which we propagate knowledge and learning and questioning, and changes to the way we collectively think, which would adjust evolutionary pressures to favour greater individual health, particularly including the expression of long-evolved genes which we're carrying already but not using, like those involved in tissue regeneration and dare I say it, longevity.
-- Jamie
Re:amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
let me get this straight (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And the good side is... (Score:2, Insightful)
J
Serendipity, followed by hard work (Score:5, Insightful)
As my old high-school physics teacher used to say, the Princes of Serendip paid that lab a visit. Luck got the ball rolling, but hard work made it into something with potential. It took an observant, inquiring mind to note that the ear holes were closing, and to choose to investigate it further. Fortune favors the prepared mind, especially in science.
Re:amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
There is another mechanism for dealing with major injuries: development of scar tissue. Scaring happens much faster and takes fewer resources than regeneration. There appears to be an anti-correlation between scaring and regeneration: animals that scar don't regenerate and vice-versa, so there may be some overloading of the genes that control both processes, making them mutually incompatible.
Given that survivable loss of limbs and survivable loss of internal organs is a relatively rare occurence for most mammals, it is likely that scaring has been favoured over regeneration in our evolutionary history as it is the mechanism that gives injured organisms the greatest chance of survival.
In particular, mammals lead active lives because we are warm blooded, and therefore need to hunt/scavange/forage regularly for food to keep our body temperature stable. This means that rapid healing is a big advantage, so scaring is favoured. Modern reptile are cold-blooded, and therefore can sustain much longer periods without food, making them more able to take the time out of their busy schedule to regenerate.
Horrible consequences? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:amazing (Score:2, Insightful)
According to the (too brief) article, ordinary mice injected with the cells also were able to regenerate lost organs. So rather than an inherent trait, this can be applied only when the benefits overwhelm any risk.
The potential is so enormous that I'm amazed this is not getting more coverage. It makes me suspicious. Googling for news reports containing "Heber-Katz" returns only two articles!
Re:Yet another scientific advance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Karma (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, this isn't really a free lunch. I mean, we're doing all this research to find out this kind of stuff. That seems like a fair price in a cosmic sense. (Whatever cosmic means.)
Welcome to the intellectual dead zone (Score:4, Insightful)
However it is at he University of Pennsylvania (U Penn), which I believe is a different school from Penn State which one person posted.
Google: Ellen Heber-Katz Wistar
You will note that a genome screen was conducted at some point in time finding genes on 5 different chromosomes involved in wound healing and regeneration. The regeneration takes place by a mass of cells forming at the wound site that can form into many different tissue types, i.e. like stem cells. Indeed it seems (from a cursory scan of a few links) that stem cells injected into other mice also work. And this facility can be inherited.
There is related research going on in different areas including observation of self-healing optical nerves, heart muscle, and even spinal cord once the scar tissue and scarring agents if that's what they are saying, are cleared away.
It is being reported at a conference in a week but already Nature and other publications seem to be involved at least in the past. Wistar is famous for vaccine development too.
If someone with real knowledge in the field could pop in now I'd sure appreciate it.
I can say one more thing. Humans can regenerate to a very limited extent already. I know because my mother chopped off the tip of her finger in a folding chair (shiver) when she was little. The tip grew back with the nail, though I'm not sure if a joint actually grew back the way these mice did.
The point is scientists never believed regeneration was possible even with such evidence, then views turned around, and now we have finally gotten to this amazing milestone. It is not an instantaneous thing. There is a paper cited about heart regeneration in the MRL mouse in 2002. They found the "healer" mouse in 1998. But it seems a milestone has obviously been met and it sounds like things are going to accelerate if more people can start working on the gene functions and biochemistry involved.
Heber Katz' talk [cam.ac.uk]
will be given on Sept. 7 at Queens' College in Cambridge, England. The whole conference sounds very interesting, it would be nice if someone with a brain and some training could report on it to slashdot.
GREAT! A never-ending supply of chicken wings (Score:3, Insightful)
I could also imagine the barricades and machine-gun emplacements that would be needed to keep the PETA activists out.
productive vs. burden (Score:4, Insightful)
The applications are mind-boggling. Of course the amputees are the most obvious beneficiaries. But one of the mice regrew optic nerves, that means quadrapeligics, blind deaf. Maybe people with MS, diabetes, various other degenerative and chronic diseases that pour resources into drug manufacturing companies.
I'm only focusing on the money/resources aspect because it is the most concrete, and because that investment could be spent on making the planet more livable, or reducing the impact of humans on the environment. One could also make a pretty good arguement that curing a fellow man is the right thing to do in a moral sense, but that isn't my point. I'm saying that worrying about the environment is a luxury that many people who are just trying to survive and live their lives don't have, and if you raise their qualitiy of life, they may be able to start thinking about the long term.